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Friday, February 20, 2015

The Boo Radleys: Giant Steps

1) I Hang Suspended; 2) Upon
9th And Fairchild; 3) Wish I Was Skinny; 4) Leaves And Sand; 5) Butterfly
McQueen; 6) Rodney King (Song For Lenny Bruce); 7) Thinking Of Ways; 8) Barney
(...And Me); 9) Spun Around; 10) If You Want It, Take It; 11) Best Lose The
Fear; 12) Take The Time Around; 13) Lazarus; 14) One Is For; 15) Run My Way
Runway; 16) I've Lost The Reason; 17) The White Noise Revisited.

A little presumptuous, wouldn't you think, to
name your LP «in honor» of a genuinely trail­blazing record by one of your
predecessors, especially one whose vision, professionalism, and artistic depth
you have very little hope of matching. All the more strange since the music of The
Boo Radleys owes fairly little to John Coltrane, at least not in any direct
way. Of course, if you wanted, you could always trace a credible line of
development from Coltrane-era modal and free jazz to the shoegaze movement,
but, ironically, Giant Steps is The
Boo Radleys' first venture well away
from the canons of shoegazing and into the territory of more dynamic, concisely
structured, catchy psychedelic pop. A giant step for the Boos, perhaps — a
fairly tiny blip for mankind, though, I'm afraid.

Technically speaking, Giant Steps satisfies all the conditions for establishing an
intelligent pop lover's paradise. Lovely vocal harmonies, a clever balance
between acoustic and electric guitars, an even more clever balance between «melodic»
and «noise» components, a delirious mishmash of Sixties, Seventies, and
Eighties' influences, enough creativity to fill more than one whole hour of
music, and a nice cosmopolitan flavour — no traces of the embryonic «Britpop»
with its arrogant accents and hip cockiness. How could this not be recommended? You'd have to be
tasteless, heartless, and illiterate not to recommend it.

Yet at the same time, even as Martin Carr and Sice
move deeper and deeper into the spicefield of vocal and instrumental hooks, I
have a nasty impression that they have relatively little talent for these hooks.
Giant Steps sounds good, but the
songs do not hang around for long, and it is not really a matter of the album's
excessive length (though some have complained) as it seems to be their
inability to come up with something that would really truly be «the Boo Radleys
sound» and nobody else's. A song like ʽWish I Was Skinnyʼ sounds lovely, with
its wooing fusion of acoustic rhythm, «tinkling» electric lead, atmospheric
brass and organ doubling and tripling of the rhythm, Sice's seductive crooning,
and a busy, steady tempo — but that's about it: «lovely», without getting under
the skin by means of some truly striking device.

I almost feel ashamed writing this, because I
really want to love Giant Steps: the
lack of «theo­retical» innovation should not bother us at all, as long as the
songs properly hit the proper emo­tional centers. But they do only twice, at
the very beginning and then again right at the end. ʽI Hang Suspendedʼ,
lyrically conceived as some sort of answer to some sort of antagonist
("ain't that just you know the facts, but you haven't got a clue about me
or my life") and instrumentally presented as an energetic funk-pop rocker,
is quite a rousing introduction — and ʽThe White Noise Revisitedʼ, closing the
album on a gentle farewell note, has a sentimental mantra for a coda
("hey! what's that noise? do you remember?"), lushly arranged and making
for a stately conclu­sion, although you eventually begin to wonder if its
stateliness does not come exclusively from its repetitiveness... well,
hopefully not.

The basic agenda of The Boo Radleys, now that
the noise clouds have dissipated a bit, is clear: they are dreamers, escapists,
big fans of Sgt. Pepper, and, like
all those Elephant 6 bands on the other side of the ocean, they want to restore
its original fifth-dimensional colours to pop music. Their basic failure is
also exactly the same as in the case of most such bands — they love their
influences so much, they want to make that
kind of music, but everything that comes out is spi­ritually, if not
technically or intellectually, inferior. As an experiment, I have listened to
the song ʽBest Lose The Fearʼ, which seemed like a worthy candidate, three
times in a row — all I hear is half-hearted McCartnyisms without any real understanding of how it should
really work. For one thing, Sice has a beautiful vocal tone, but he doesn't do anything with it — generally staying
on the exact same «pretty» frequency, almost as if such a thing as «vocal
modulation» never existed. For another thing, the accompanying colorfully
distorted lead guitar part never seems to pretend to anything but colorful
accompaniment — the humble Martin Carr never lets it develop into a proper solo
or even into a particularly flashy, noticeable riff. It's simply there for the
color. It's a nice color, but the real nicety of the color always reveals
itself when it's organized into a shape.

The big single from the album was ʽLazarusʼ, a
densely arranged, epic track into which they really must have put a lot of work
— but behind all the overwhelming layers of electronic noise, solemn brass, and
roaring guitars, lies a very simple and not specifically attractive or
innovative folk-pop melody from God knows back when. They put enough makeup on
it to make it into a cosmic anthem, and sometimes, this might work, but for me,
ʽLazarusʼ does not work. It seems to be trying to make some big point, and it
comes out sounding as heavy psycho muzak.

Despite all these criticisms, I respect sincere
craft as much as I worship authentic genius, and be­cause of that, Giant Steps gets a thumbs up. At the very least, it
gives us a band that has mana­ged to go beyond the obvious trends and fads of
its time and either decide to boldly pursue some eclectic ambitions, or
discover its own true colors — or both. In my opinion, The Boo Radleys are
mediocre songwriters and unimpressive visionaries, but that does not prevent
them from de­veloping a potentially
great, colorful, friendly sound, which must have sounded even greater,
friendlier, more colorful back in 1993 than it does today, and which still
remains well worth revisiting for every serious lover of «psycho-pop».

1 comment:

ʽThe White Noise Revisitedʼ, closing the album on a gentle farewell note, has a sentimental mantra for a coda ("hey! what's that noise? do you remember?"), lushly arranged and making for a stately conclu­sion, although you eventually begin to wonder if its stateliness does not come exclusively from its repetitiveness... well, hopefully not.These guys tend to mistake "annoyance" for "attention-getting", some of the noise really irritated me, so when I saw this track coming up, I was ready to hit stop and move on to the next album. Instead, it wormed its way into my ear. It is indeed repetitive, mantraic, and a little childish, but that damn refrain is STILL circling in my brain...